Friends with benefits

People with a ton of “friends” on Facebook tend to have areas of their brain that are bigger than people with fewer friends on the social network, report researchers at University College London.

For the study, the researchers scanned the brains of 125 students who used Facebook, finding that the number of Facebook friends students had correlated with the size of the grey matter in the amygdala, right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex — more friends, more grey matter.

“What we’ve shown is an association between the number of friends on Facebook and certain areas of the brain and the structure of those areas,” says lead researcher Dr Geraint Rees. “It could be that people have a large number of friends on Facebook simply because the structure of these brain regions is larger, but it could be the other way around – that is, with people who have a large number of friends on Facebook, that might influence their brain structure. We cannot tell from this study alone which one of those two it is.”